Re: What's left over.

Patrick Finnegan
2002-11-01T16:08:17Z

What I'm going to say may not be popular, and probably won't win me
friends, but here it is anyhow:

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Alexander Viro wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
> > No, vendor == people who sold or gave us the softare. Right now, Linus is
> > acting like he's a big evil corporation that won't add the change no
> > matter what we say:
>
> ... to his tree. Geez, why could that be? Maybe because you don't have
> any rights to decide what patches does anybody else apply to their trees?
>
> It's not a fscking public service. Linus has full control over his
> tree. You have equally full control over your tree. Linus can't
> tell you what patches to apply in your tree. You can't tell Linus
> what patches he should apply to his.

I'm sorry it _is_ a public service. Once tens of people started
contributing to it, it became one. This is like saying that the
Washington Monument belongs to the peole that maintain it, any building
belongs to the repair crews and janitors. I'm not saying that Linus is
necessarily a janitor, but when you consider how much of the Linux kernel
that he didn't write, you may relize that it's not just his kernel. It
also belongs to every single person that has written even a single
line of code in it.

BTW, "My opinions do not represent the opinions of my employer" for at
least this email..

Pat
--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage